Larry Parsons: A wounded child's empathy for secession

As a young and incredible child, my aspirational goals were often blocked by two older sisters.

They got to stay up late watching horror movies while they put me to bed early — oddly I can't recall if the restraints were plastic or chain metal — from where I could only guess at the havoc created by the Mummy's marriage to young Frankenstein's daughter by a previous wife.

From the size of ice cream servings to seats by the window in the car, I was regularly outvoted by the two votes my sisters wielded like cudgels over my one.

Each day brought new examples of the horrors of these small, but telling episodes of democracy.

Hopelessly outnumbered then, I can sympathize now with the bruised feelings of the many thousands of Americans who have signed secession petitions posted on a White House tell-us-your-gripe site.

President Barack Obama won re-election, and these patriots, with their freedoms imperiled by certain, advanced mind-control techniques employed by the gift-bearing chief commissar, are swiftly certain that America is no longer exceptional. "Country first, you're kidding. We're out of here!"

Now some of these secession fans are no doubt hot-heads, sore losers and crazies.

A leader of the Alabama petitioners cites his city's 2001 closure of his topless car wash as the prime example of governmental infringement on his liberty. I am surprised he didn't seek sanctuary years ago from the jackbooted thugs who extinguished his tiny scented candle then flickering for all risk-taking creators of topless jobs.

Though a recent poll showed 43 percent of Republicans amenable to the idea of secession, the intellectual underpinning of many of those petition signers is highly suspect.

A good number of the neo-America Lasters have inchoate fears that the Uncle Joe Obama administration will ship folks of their ilk to concentration camps. Yet, the first thing they do after the election is provide the odious government with handy lists of their names. This vestigial belief in their (former) constitutional right to petition the government is touching.

Some Americans — the ones neo-secessionists see as Obamunists — are encouraging this incipient wave of self-deportation. "Yes, go right ahead," they gloat. "Good luck on finding another advanced country without a freedom-killing system of national health care."

Sore winners, I call them. Gleefully imagining liberated Texans without the Dallas Cowboys — America's team — to root for, or the Cowboy cheerleaders' outfits to inspect for some sign of actual fabric. Let's move the Houston space complex to Dayton, Ohio, they suggest, and require "papers, please" of Dallas residents to legally visit the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland.

As a young and stupendous child, I was driven once to secede by the supermajority of my older sisters. I returned by nightfall, weary and homesick, with half-eaten peanut butter sandwiches in my knapsack.

"Just wait four more years," I probably thought, as I heard a howling Wolfman ambush the Creature from the Black Lagoon on my family's semper fidelis American TV.